


The Final Girl

by Haloferax



Category: Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle
Genre: Crack, Ho Yay, Horror, I Don't Even Know, Original Character(s), Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-11
Updated: 2013-09-10
Packaged: 2017-12-26 06:12:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/962552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Haloferax/pseuds/Haloferax
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Our brave heroes find themselves trapped in a haunted house with a murderous ghost, some unhelpful teenagers, and no clue what's going on. Also, Kurogane experiences true and utter horror.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Rules of Horror

**Author's Note:**

> I have no idea how to rate this fic, seriously. Uh. It's cracky and contains all of the random (albeit completely off-screen in this case) violence and latent racism/sexism/homophobia/weird shit inherent in the standard horror movie format. 
> 
> Set sometime pre-Acid Tokyo.

It all began with a house. Its front was quite dilapidated, the windows sinister in some inexplicable way, some of the shingles torn off by the wind. The house stood on a hill of yellow grass, with no other structures for as far as the eye could see, and the backyard opened onto a dense forest. A bare tree out front played host to an underfed crow, which fixed the four interlopers with a malevolent glare. 

“Are you sure this is the place?” wondered Syaoran. 

“Mokona is sure that Sakura’s feather is here, but Mokona also thinks it looks scary.” 

Perhaps it was the forlorn look of the house and the landscape that frightened Mokona. Or maybe, just maybe, it was the sign out front. 

‘For sale! (read the sign) This house is the scene of five grisly murders and is said to be haunted by the ghost of a creepy child. Beautiful lot; just enough room for a swimming pool. Would be a great buy for families moving in from out of town. Also great for being broken into by irresponsible teenagers.’ 

“Doesn’t that sound thrilling, Kuro-pipi?”

* * *

The first thing they saw upon walking in the door was the most exciting wall in the world. 

“What,” wondered Syaoran in astonishment, “does RED RUM mean, and why would someone write it on the wall in blood?” 

Maybe next time they saw Yuuko it would be a good idea to ask her if ghosts wrote graffiti often. The number of words written on the wall in blood was really astonishing. 

“The ghost must . . . be . . . really into calligraphy,” said the princess weakly. 

And then, there was — 

“Wait, no, don’t touch that! Please!” Sakura withdrew her fingers just in time to heed Syaoran’s exclamation. She continued, however, to stare at that spot on the wall. She had never seen a wall dripping with otherworldly green slime before.

* * *

The four searched the whole ground floor of the house without finding anything of interest. There was a kitchen which was somewhat disappointing in that there weren’t any dead bodies whatsoever stored in the fridge. A main room and a small office proved to be full of cobwebs, more blood graffiti, and some unnecessarily large spiders — but no feathers. 

No one was sure whether it would be better to try the second floor next or the basement, but somehow they had ended up on the second floor. And that was where they ran into the three teenagers. 

“You’re not the ghost!” announced the girl who appeared to be the leader of the three in a tone that could have been either relief or indignation. And then she shook her head very quickly, so that her long, chestnut brown hair flipped over her shoulder in a particularly exciting way. 

“Yeah, Vanessa. No shit.” 

“Go fuck yourself, Jeff. I bet you’ll be the next one to die, anyway.” 

“Don’t listen to her, Jeff,” sneered a blonde girl in a halter top and a short, pleated skirt. “Vanessa’s always just been a jealous ho bag.” 

“Er . . . ” Syaoran had the unpleasant feeling that he had just walked into the social equivalent of a fish head that had been lying on the ground for a week. 

And still, somehow they ended up going back with the three squabbling teenagers to the room they had holed up in.

* * *

Syaoran, Sakura, and Fay listened intently to what the teenagers had to say — because that was what they did — while Kurogane sat in the back of the room and tried to swat Mokona with a rolled-up newspaper — because that was what he did. 

The house was haunted — so they said, “they” being one of the foremost purveyors of information in any universe — by the restless spirit of a creepy little girl, creepy little girls being another pan-universal commonplace. The pint-size witch, who had had prophetic dreams and experienced other such uncanny phenomena while alive, had obviously continued to stalk the hallways of her former residence, writing unpleasant messages in her own blood and brutally killing anyone who dared to drop by for a visit. 

“So, like the actual police report says that the whole family was murdered in their sleep by some random stalker dude who was in love with the mother,” said the blonde girl, who was named Tiffanie. “But they say that actually she was the one who killed her parents and siblings and everyone else.” 

“Ah . . . how is she supposed to have died, then?” asked Fay. 

Tiffanie gave him a sour look. “Look, whatever, I don’t know. That’s just how the story goes.” 

In their infinite wisdom, Vanessa, Jeff, and Tiffanie — along with a collection of other friends who had since then mysteriously disappeared — had decided to go see if the stories were true. 

“And then the doors locked all by themselves, and we weren’t able to get out, and oh my God, it’s like, only the three of us left,” wailed Vanessa. 

“It took Chad this morning,” Jeff confirmed. “Scary shit, bro. It’s just these tentacles, and it drags people away, and no one ever sees them again. Now gimme another one of those beers.”

* * *

“I’m still not sure I believe in this whole ghost thing,” muttered Syaoran. It wasn't that he didn't believe in ghosts in the abstract. It was just that . . . “They didn’t really sound like they knew what they were talking about.” 

They had searched every room on the second floor, again turning up nothing but some more spiders and one large black rat. 

“What did you think about it, Fay-san?” asked Sakura as she skimmed her flashlight over a particularly large bloodstain. 

“Hey, Fay-san?” 

The hallway felt suddenly cold, and a shiver ran up her back. 

“When was the last time anyone saw Fay-san?” 

The three exchanged a look. It was a look that said: shit! Fuck! Expletives, expletives, expletives! 

“I . . . I don’t know,” Syaoran admitted. 

Kurogane was staring, with an expression of growing horror, at a lone shoe lying at the end of the hall, a small spot of blood — fresh blood, this time, still slowing sinking into the carpet — on the floor next to it.

* * *

“You _knew_ this was going to happen?” The ninja looked like he was about to have an aneurysm. “You — knew — this — ” 

Tiffanie gave him a startled look. “Well, yeah. Of course. I mean, it’s all in the rules, isn’t it?” 

Noticing the blank-tending-towards-murderous look on Kurogane’s face, she continued, “The rules. You’re not really telling me you don’t know the rules . . . Oh, wow. Like, you seriously don’t. Hang on a sec.”

She walked to a dusty bookshelf and pulled out a tome with the appropriate title _Rules of Horror_ printed on the spine in an exciting blood red color. “It’s right here, you see, all in black and white. ‘Rule #23: If there is a gay friend, he won’t make it past the first half hour.’ See? I’m sorry, but he was just too camp to live.” 

The three travelers stared for a moment at the book in silence. 

“That’s . . . I mean, no,” said Syaoran, “Is that even okay? Like, at all?” 

“Well, you know, like, I guess,” began Vanessa, “I guess it’s like . . . ” 

“Like supernatural hate crime,” finished Jeff. “That’s pretty tough, bro. They should, you know, make a law or something. Saying ghosts can’t do that kind of shit.” 

“Look,” said Tiffanie, and she rolled a strand of hair around one finger as she spoke. “The point is, it’s just in the rules that some people won’t survive, okay? Don’t bitch about it. He had to die first since there hasn’t been a black guy for a long time. By the way, if you had anything you wanted to say to anyone, now might be a good time.” She gave Kurogane a pointed look at that last part. 

“What does that mean?” He almost didn’t want to hear the answer. He almost wanted to just go ahead and burn the entire house to the ground. It would probably improve the ambience. 

“Well, it’s like, you’re Asian. Duh. So that’s like, almost as bad as being black.” 

“What about Syaoran and Sakura?” demanded Mokona suddenly from its perch on an overstuffed armchair. 

The three teenagers looked at the kids in question somewhat suspiciously. “But you guys are all, like, you have light brown hair and stuff, so I think probably you’re like honorable white people?” 

“Oh my God, Jeff. _Honorary_ white people. Not _honorable_ white people. Like. Oh. My. God.” 

“The point is, though,” Tiffanie continued, “There’s a ton of other stuff that can also get you killed. Like, if you’re too stupid. Or too smart. Or if you smoke pot, or if you have sex, or you know, whatever.” 

“Hey, you,” demanded Vanessa suddenly, rounding on the kids. “Are you two screwing?” 

From the sound he made, Syaoran had just choked on his own saliva. 

Sakura had turned an amazing shade of crimson and was waving her hands in front of her furiously. “N-no, Syaoran-kun and I are — we’re just — we’re friends — ” 

Tiffanie gave her a slow, appraising glance. “Oh em gee. You’re a virgin, aren’t you?” 

Syaoran was choking again. Kurogane slapped him on the back. 

Vanessa and Jeff were now looking at her intently as well. “It’s true, isn’t it?” they said in unison, a look of shock working its way across both of their faces. 

The three shared a glance, and then looked back at the princess with expressions of deep reverence, as if they had just encountered a rare and holy creature. Vanessa looked close to tears. 

“It’s her,” she whispered. “Oh my God, she’s finally here.” 

“Who?” demanded Kurogane irritably. 

“The Final Girl. You know. That’s in the rules, too. She’s the only one who’s going to make it out of here alive.”


	2. The Scissors of Ultimate Terror

It was impossible to tell where the situation might have gone next, had Syaoran (who had just barely recovered from his choking fit) not suddenly shushed everyone. 

“Does anyone else hear that?” 

They listened in silence for a moment, and then, “Like, is that . . . scissors?” 

The sound was very faint, but in the end unmistakable, and the fact that there was no clear reason for it to be so ominous made it all the more unsettling. Mokona jumped into an inner pocket of Syaoran’s jacket, where it curled up into a little ball. 

It seemed to be coming from above them and to the right. “It’s coming from the little girl’s room,” whispered Jeff in abject terror. 

“I don’t want to know what that is,” growled Kurogane. “I don’t want to know what it is; I don’t ever want to know what it is; I’m going to go find out what it is.” 

“Kurogane wants to go rescue Fay!” burbled Mokona from the safety of Syaoran’s jacket. 

Kurogane kicked a convenient sofa in irritation. “Look, I just don’t actually want that moron dead, that’s all. I don’t even like him — You know what, never mind.” 

“He’s sulking,” Mokona observed wisely.

* * *

That was how Kurogane ended up marching up the stairs, hitting the wall at random points with his sword (causing large-scale loss of spider habitat in the process, not that anyone ever stops to think about the spiders) to express the depths of his displeasure. Sakura and Syaoran followed a few paces behind, and a few paces behind them went Tiffanie, Vanessa, and Jeff. 

The door at the end of the hall had such exciting features as a doorknob encrusted with dried blood. Kurogane kicked it in. 

The others stopped dead at the sound of the blood-curdling scream he emitted as soon as he stepped through the door.

* * *

It was . . . It was . . . It was truly horrifying. Kurogane had battled demons, counter-assassinated assassins, and seen his mother murdered by a hand that randomly appeared out of thin air. (And yeah, that last one had been pretty damn weird, on top of being pretty damn upsetting.) He had literally waded knee-deep in gore, and yet never before in his life had he felt such an overpowering urge to turn, run, and lock himself away in a trunk somewhere. Or maybe a refrigerator box. Or a closet. There was sort of a nice ring to that last one, wasn’t there? — Although he could not possibly have said quite why. 

The room had indeed been a young girl’s room. Once. Now the large, vapid-looking teddy bear sitting on a chair in the corner had acquired a zombie-like aura due to the bloodstains all over it, and the once-pink walls contained various obscure but probably quite sinister phrases in oversize and distressingly crimson letters. Oh, and there was the dead girl herself, of course. She sat in a chair at the side of the bed, her face downturned in an eerie manner. Like all undead children, she had very long, pitch black hair; she wore a simple white dress. A small, extraordinarily dirty plush rabbit sat on her lap. 

Let’s be clear, though: that wasn’t what made Kurogane scream. 

What made him scream was the fact that he now knew, horribly and irreversibly, the source of the sound of scissors they had heard earlier. The dead girl held a pair of scissors in one hand and a sheet a pink construction paper in the other. She was cutting the paper into what looked suspiciously like the shape of a heart. The Valentine’s kind, too, not the bloody-just-torn-from-a-victim’s-chest kind. On the floor were several other hearts, a sheaf of construction paper, and a number of tubes of glitter glue. And there was a banner that read, in happy-looking glitter glue letters, “WE LOVE YOU, KURO-CHAN!” 

“Ah, Kuro-myu, we’re sorry we didn’t have a chance to finish before you arrived!” 

Oh yeah, and then there was _him_. He was sitting in another chair, apparently unharmed save for a large scrape on the foot he’d lost his shoe from, some minor cuts and bruises, and, for some reason, splotches of some of that green slime. 

He was applying more glitter glue — and some flower-shaped stickers — to another one of those damn hearts. And he had that idiotic smile plastered across his face again. 

Kurogane opened his mouth, and then closed it. The amount of sheer rage at this idiot’s behavior (because surely what he was feeling was rage at this idiot’s behavior, and no other emotions whatsoever, thank you very much) would have required words that did not currently exist in any language anywhere. 

“ _I was afraid you were dead,_ ” he finally managed to sputter. 

“Sorry about that. But look, what else was I supposed to do when I suddenly got grabbed by the ankle by these absolutely adorable terrifying shadow tentacles belonging to this cute girl? I mean, really, Kuro-tan. It’s bad manners to refuse hospitality when someone extends it to you. And I was so surprised to find someone here who knows you.” 

Kurogane stared blankly into space while those last words sunk in. He was pretty damn sure that he didn’t know any creepy undead girls. 

“I, especially, should also apologize for all the trouble.” — No. Wait. That voice. It couldn’t be — 

And then she raised her head, and the truth became apparent. 

“T-Tomoyo-hime?” 

There could be no doubt: the little girl was surely one and the same as the princess of Shirasaki Castle. Well, you know, if the princess had suddenly woken up one morning as an eldritch abomination. 

The two giggled in unison. “She’s not a princess. Just a completely adorable girl. Don’t you agree, Kuro-chi?” And that was when Fay reached over and hugged the eldritch abomination in question, as if it were the most completely normal thing in the world. Kurogane was somewhat concerned to note that she was hugging him back, with some of those horrifying shadows, or tentacles, or whatever they were as well as her arms. 

“Oh, Fay-san! I’m so glad you’re all right!” Suddenly, the others poured into the room, Sakura first, with Syaoran at her heels with Mokona perched on his shoulder, and then those three stupid teenagers, who bumbled in with the appearance of people who had no idea anymore what was going on, which of course they didn’t. 

Tomoyo smiled as sweetly as the undead possibly can. “You can’t imagine how happy I am to meet you at last. The Final Girl.”

* * *

“So, it was the feather that started all of this,” Syaoran summed up. He felt the need to say something helpful: after all, the last thing he had said had misfired fairly severely. All he had done was ask Kurogane if he wanted the rest of them to leave so he could have a moment alone with Fay. Now Syaoran knew what it felt like to be on the receiving end of a bona fide death glare. 

Anyway. Back to the feather. Syaoran wasn’t sure whether or not it made him a bad person that he felt so relieved that it was now Vanessa, Jeff, and Tiffanie who were cowering under Kurogane’s glare. 

“You used it to raise the dead. _You used it to raise the dead._ ” 

— Well, all right, not quite raise the dead, a feat which, Fay had assured them, was considered impossible even for skilled magicians. But the power of Sakura’s feather had transformed their ouija board into a channeling device capable of forcibly dragging spirits up from the comfortable netherworld and trapping them in creepy houses. 

“We didn’t mean to! W-we thought it would be funny!” blubbered Tiffanie. 

“And you never bothered to mention this to us earlier. So maybe you knew it was not that funny,” Syaoran observed. 

“Of course it wasn’t!” wailed Vanessa. “Like, it was terrifying! It was the worst thing that’s ever happened to me in my life. I totally thought I was going to die!” 

“I mean, look, bro, we’re sorry about what happened to Chad, and Mindy, and Brian, and . . . uh . . . ” 

“Christy,” offered Vanessa helpfully. 

“Oh, yeah. Thanks, Van. So, Chad, and Mindy, and Brian, and Christy. Sucks about them. Sorry about him, too,” Jeff concluded, pointing back over his shoulder at Fay. 

Fay smiled as if to say, _No problem, bro,_ except of course he didn’t actually say that, because if Fay were ever to utter the word bro, the entire multiverse would collapse instantly in a pile of molten slush out of pure shock. For some completely unfathomable reason, he and Tomoyo were still decorating those pink hearts, and they had even been joined by Sakura. 

Sakura paused in applying stickers to Kurogane’s name, and her eyebrows knit together. “There’s one thing I still don’t understand, though. Tomoyo-chan, you said that you were overpowered by the feather. So when they used the feather to summon you as an evil, murderous ghost, you were forced to kill the people they thought would die, right?” 

Tomoyo nodded sadly. 

“But if that’s true, and according to their rules, you should have died, Fay-san, then how did you survive?” 

“Sakura-chan, there’s almost no situation you can’t talk yourself out of. Of course, it was made a lot easier by the fact that Tomoyo-chan here told me she remembered me. It seems that last night, she had a dream about her other self, who told her a number of interesting things.” 

“Like about what a bad kid Kurogane was,” Tomoyo said with a snicker. 

“So that’s what it was?” Sakura queried. “The dream made her snap out of it?” 

“Ah, not quite. I mean, what is a dream going to do all by itself? The thing is, Tomoyo-chan also had a wish. And wishes are a very powerful thing. Would you believe that the one thing she wished for more powerfully than anything was simply to meet with the girl her dream had told her about?” 

“I . . . ” 

“That’s you, Sakura-chan. The Final Girl.” 

(“See?” demanded Vanessa. “I told you she was the Final Girl.”) 

“I believe we have something that belongs to you. I’ve been wanting so badly to find you so you can take it back.”

* * *

The feather, when they finally found it, was in the basement, along with a ouija board and, for some reason, an astonishing number of empty liquor bottles and a pizza box. 

“Oh, she has narcolepsy,” said Vanessa in disappointment. “Maybe she wasn’t actually the Fin— ”

“Shut up, Vanessa. You’re like, always such a complete bitch.” 

“By the way, what are you guys going to tell your parents?” 

The three looked at one another, and then down at the floor. “Fuck.”

* * *

“That was weird. And stupid. Let’s not do it again. Let’s just not do anything with any weird undead versions of people I know again.” Kurogane had been muttering things like that all evening, while he tried desperately to find something that would prove effective in removing unnatural green slime and squashed spiders from swords. 

“It makes me feel so special that Kuro-wanwan was worried about me, though. Although . . . it does hurt my feelings a little bit that you literally walked in the door and screamed when you saw me. I mean, really, Kuro-rin. I don’t bite or anything.”


End file.
